Quirkos is intended to be a big step forward for qualitative research. The central idea is to make text analysis so easy, that anyone can do it.

That includes people who don't know what qualitative analysis is, or that it could help them to better understand their world. This could be a council or hospital trust wanting to better understand the needs of people that use their services, or a team developing a new product, wanting feedback from users and consumers.

And for experienced researchers too, the goal was to create software that helps people engage with their data, rather than being a barrier to it. Over the last decade I've used a variety of approaches to analysing qualitative research, and many collegues and I felt that there had to be a better way.

Quirkos aims to make software to easily manage large projects, search them quickly, and keep them secure. To visualise data on the fly, so findings come alive and are sharable with a team of people. And finally to make powerful tools to sort and understand the connections in the data.

After years of planning, these pieces are finally coming together, and the prototype is already something that I prefer using to any of the other qualitative software packages out there. In the next few weeks, the first version of Quirkos will be sent to intreped researchers around the globe to test in their work. A few months later, we'll be ready to share a polished version with the world, and we're really excited that it will work for everyone: with any level of experience, and on pretty much any computer too.

There are a lot of big firsts in Quirkos, and it's going to be exciting sharing them here over the next few weeks!